New peer reviewed study: global warming lowers death rates

The doom and gloom, hell and high water howling seems to have hit a traffic obstacle in the form of a new paper in the UK that shows warmer weather saves lives. I really liked this part:

…they found there were only 0.7 death per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year, but a decrease of fully 85 deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a phenomenal lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 121.4.

Background
The authors write that “the IPCC AR4 states with very high confidence that climate change contributes to the global burden of disease and to increased mortality,” citing the contribution of Confalonieri et al. (2007) to that document.

What was done
In an effort handsomely suited to evaluate this very-high-confidence contention of the IPCC, Christidis et al. extracted the numbers of daily deaths from all causes from death registration data supplied by the UK Office of National Statistics for men and women fifty years of age or older in England and Wales for the period 1976-2005, which they divided by daily estimates of population “obtained by fitting a fifth order polynomial to mid-year population estimates, to give mortality as deaths per million people,” after which they compared the death results with surface air temperature data that showed a warming trend during the same three-decade period of 0.47°C per decade. In addition, they employed a technique called optimal detection, which they describe as “a formal statistical methodology” that can be used to estimate the role played by human adaptation in the temperature-related changes in mortality they observed.

What was learned
As expected, during the hottest portion of the year, warming led to increases in death rates, while during the coldest portion of the year it lead to decreases in death rates. More specifically, the three scientists report that if no adaptation had taken place, there would have been 1.6 additional deaths per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year over the period 1976-2005, but there would have been 47 fewer deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 29.4, which represents a huge net benefit of the warming experienced in England and Wales over the three-decade period of warming. And when adaptation was included in the analysis, as was the case in the data they analyzed, they found there were only 0.7 death per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year, but a decrease of fully 85 deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a phenomenal lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 121.4.

What it means
Clearly, the IPCC’s “very-high-confidence” conclusion is woefully wrong. Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.

For more on this important topic, including results from all around the world, see the many items we have archived under the subheadings of Health Effects (Temperature) in our Subject Index.

Reference
Christidis, N., Donaldson, G.C. and Stott, P.A. 2010. Causes for the recent changes in cold- and heat-related mortality in England and Wales. Climatic Change102: 539-553. Background
The authors write that “the IPCC AR4 states with very high confidence that climate change contributes to the global burden of disease and to increased mortality,” citing the contribution of Confalonieri et al. (2007) to that document.

What was done
In an effort handsomely suited to evaluate this very-high-confidence contention of the IPCC, Christidis et al. extracted the numbers of daily deaths from all causes from death registration data supplied by the UK Office of National Statistics for men and women fifty years of age or older in England and Wales for the period 1976-2005, which they divided by daily estimates of population “obtained by fitting a fifth order polynomial to mid-year population estimates, to give mortality as deaths per million people,” after which they compared the death results with surface air temperature data that showed a warming trend during the same three-decade period of 0.47°C per decade. In addition, they employed a technique called optimal detection, which they describe as “a formal statistical methodology” that can be used to estimate the role played by human adaptation in the temperature-related changes in mortality they observed.

What was learned
As expected, during the hottest portion of the year, warming led to increases in death rates, while during the coldest portion of the year it lead to decreases in death rates. More specifically, the three scientists report that if no adaptation had taken place, there would have been 1.6 additional deaths per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year over the period 1976-2005, but there would have been 47 fewer deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 29.4, which represents a huge net benefit of the warming experienced in England and Wales over the three-decade period of warming. And when adaptation was included in the analysis, as was the case in the data they analyzed, they found there were only 0.7 death per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year, but a decrease of fully 85 deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a phenomenal lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 121.4.

What it means
Clearly, the IPCC’s “very-high-confidence” conclusion is woefully wrong. Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.

For more on this important topic, including results from all around the world, see the many items we have archived under the subheadings of Health Effects (Temperature) in our Subject Index.

Reference
Christidis, N., Donaldson, G.C. and Stott, P.A. 2010. Causes for the recent changes in cold- and heat-related mortality in England and Wales. Climatic Change102: 539-553. Background
The authors write that “the IPCC AR4 states with very high confidence that climate change contributes to the global burden of disease and to increased mortality,” citing the contribution of Confalonieri et al. (2007) to that document.

What was done
In an effort handsomely suited to evaluate this very-high-confidence contention of the IPCC, Christidis et al. extracted the numbers of daily deaths from all causes from death registration data supplied by the UK Office of National Statistics for men and women fifty years of age or older in England and Wales for the period 1976-2005, which they divided by daily estimates of population “obtained by fitting a fifth order polynomial to mid-year population estimates, to give mortality as deaths per million people,” after which they compared the death results with surface air temperature data that showed a warming trend during the same three-decade period of 0.47°C per decade. In addition, they employed a technique called optimal detection, which they describe as “a formal statistical methodology” that can be used to estimate the role played by human adaptation in the temperature-related changes in mortality they observed.

What was learned
As expected, during the hottest portion of the year, warming led to increases in death rates, while during the coldest portion of the year it lead to decreases in death rates. More specifically, the three scientists report that if no adaptation had taken place, there would have been 1.6 additional deaths per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year over the period 1976-2005, but there would have been 47 fewer deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 29.4, which represents a huge net benefit of the warming experienced in England and Wales over the three-decade period of warming. And when adaptation was included in the analysis, as was the case in the data they analyzed, they found there were only 0.7 death per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year, but a decrease of fully 85 deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a phenomenal lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 121.4.

What it means
Clearly, the IPCC’s “very-high-confidence” conclusion is woefully wrong. Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.

For more on this important topic, including results from all around the world, see the many items we have archived under the subheadings of Health Effects (Temperature) in our Subject Index.

Any word from Chris Huhne (the ecoloon) on the beneficial effects of Global Warming/Climate Change/Climate Disruption which he and the rest of the ecoloon coalition want to halt or, worse still, reverse?

Last winter was the coldest in the UK for 30 years. In 1981 I remember statistics coming out about the weekly death rates. Last year nothing. There were statistics about accidents through slipping on the ice. Maybe it is another area where the government has stopped caring, along with the increase in fuel poverty as a result of paying for green energy.

I would be interested in reading what Steve McIntyre would say about this method…

“a technique called optimal detection, which they describe as “a formal statistical methodology” that can be used to estimate the role played by human adaptation in the temperature-related changes in mortality they observed.”

HAHAHAHAHA, is it ok if we gloat for a minute and say “Told ya so!”? I know it isn’t very sporting to say “Told ya so!”, but maybe we can make an exception this once and say “Told ya so!” to all of the warmistas that thought we’d all die a painful death due to milder winters. OTOH, maybe we should be more gracious than to say “Told ya so!”. But, I think there may be some sorted satisfaction that comes with saying “Told ya so!” I just can’t make up my mind as to whether we should say “Told ya so!” or perhaps we shouldn’t say “Told ya so!” and just soak it in for a moment.

SandyInDerby says:
November 23, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Any word from Chris Huhne (the ecoloon) on the beneficial effects of Global Warming/Climate Change/Climate Disruption which he and the rest of the ecoloon coalition want to halt or, worse still, reverse?

Getting information from Mr Huhne is not easy, so it would seem. I wrote to Mr Huhne a month ago requesting information. So far no reply of any kind.

Coincidentally, the yearly statistics for excess winter deaths in England and Wales were just updated today.

It says the figure for 2009/10 is provisional and it really beggars belief. The winter before was balmy in comparison and that number is 50% higher. Did tens of thousands of people lose their lives to that barbecue summer?

Not really a surprise, but nice to see a group of academics go to all this trouble to prove the patently obvious. Seems to be the only method there is to drive all the nails home in the AGW coffin/gravy train.

For all of the BILLIONS of dollars in Climate Ca$h that we’re spending annually, what societal benefit have we seen? Have the AGW science advocates provided anything that has benefited someone other than themselves? Has global warming research saved any lives, led to better crop production, forecast any change in hurricane activity that has actually come true, … ANYTHING?

In my opinion, it has been a colossal WASTE OF MONEY, and in fact, has done nothing but enrich the ruling class elites (e.g. Al Gore and Jim Hansen). Career government scientists have boarded the Climate Research gravy train seeking nothing more than to fund themselves for an extended period of time and to delude themselves into thinking they were benefiting society. If they are helping society in some way, I’d like to know how…

Bearing in mind the authors explicitly state “This analysis is specific to England and Wales and one could expect attribution results to vary in parts of the world with different adaptive capacity to heat and cold and different effects of climate change.”

and also say that…

“However, even if climate change significantly
decreases cold-related mortality, this benefit should be considered alongside the
other, predominantly detrimental, health impacts discussed in Section 1″

“Moreover, even if the synergy between adaptation and milder winters decreases the
total mortality related to cold and heat, extreme events like heatwaves may still exert
a stress beyond the adaptation limits on the population. Such events are accompanied
by sharp increases in daily mortality which cause public concern and attract ample
media attention. A well studied example is the 2003 European heatwave which cost
the lives of more than 30,000 people”http://www.springerlink.com/content/h410p635k3830865/

Despite the abundance of caveates to conclude from this paper, as you seem to have, that …”Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. ”

If they are using adjusted temperature data, they are correlating rising temperatures that are mostly due to UHI with the survival/ death rate. Does the phenomenon occur mostly in large urban areas?
Should old people move near the airport?
Maybe it is overall energy usage that correlates to greater survival.
Are they looking at specific causes of death?
There are many pitfalls here.

I am absolutely astonished that some folks on this website, (including you, Mr Watts) claiming to have a science background, which would imply at least a modicum of basic understanding on basic principles of comparative analysis, would choose to compare the results of a study based on a population of approx 60m people at latitudes 50-55 degrees (i.e. England and Wales) to an IPCC report which addresses the impacts of global warming across the planet. This is cherry picking at its most blatant and absurd, and serves only to show the lengths that the denialist camp will go to in attempts to create confusion around such a serious issue.
REPLY: Be as astonished as you wish. Question: Do you heat your house up there in British Columbia? And if so why?

Second question: do you think it is OK to divine the temperature of the MWP from just a handful of tree ring samples? Such as those in Yamal? – Anthony

I would be interested in reading what Steve McIntyre would say about this method…

“a technique called optimal detection, which they describe as “a formal statistical methodology” that can be used to estimate the role played by human adaptation in the temperature-related changes in mortality they observed.”

Dunno, but in statistical terminology, the word “optimal” generally needs to be referenced to something, e.g., optimal w.r.t. minimum mean square error, otherwise it is meaningless. I would expect that the paper/study defines which criteria for optimality is used (MMSE is typical, and often the easiest to compute) though I would not be surprised if any article/press release regarding the paper/study does not.

The following study seems to indicate that the peak in admissions etc. for the over 65s is during cold spells.

Excess winter morbidity and mortality among older people remain significant public health issues in those European countries which experience relatively mild winter temperatures, particularly the United Kingdom (UK), Ireland, Portugal and Spain. In the UK, episodes of severe winter weather, when ambient temperatures fall below 5° C, are associated with peaks in general practitioner consultations, hospital admissions, and cardiovascular deaths among those aged over 65.http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7008664

Cherry picked, indeed, because it serves to reason only places that actually get cold will suffer cold-related deaths. Furthermore, places that are not impacted by global warming seem unlikely as good sources of data when attempting to compare changes in death rates due to… global warming. Gee, how hard is this to understand?

and serves only to show the lengths that the denialist camp will go to in attempts to create confusion around such a serious issue.

And your comment serves only to show how little you understand or are willing to attempt to understand. Shame, really, that people can think as you and still get up in the morning.

I have just had a look at the UK Office of Statistics figure into the 2009 / 2010 excess winter deaths and it looks suspicious. The brutal winter of 2009/2010 registered 25,400 people. While 2008/2009 exess winter deaths registered around 36,000 exess winter deaths. I thought this past winter was the worst in over 30 years!!!http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=574

This study looked only at the UK. The IPCC looks at the whole world. You people obviously don’t care about the folk who died in the Russian heatwave or the Pakistani floods this year, or the crop failures in both those countries and Africa and a host of other places.

Because the fact that it’s warmer in January in England is the only thing which matters in your little minds. We are OK, stuff the rest of the world, eh. Makes me proud to be British it does.

I know that I am not a scientist and not really equipped to comment, but I am an accountant, economist and energy adviser to the odd Government or two. Empirical evidence from my time running a pensions office in the UK was that we worked overtime when the temperature fell below zero in the daytime because old people died. Empirical evidence from my time collecting energy debts from poor neighbourhoods.: they cannot cope with higher bills in cold weather, and they resent unnecessarily high bills – as now. Finally subjective evidence from my regular November visits to work in the Caribbean (someone has to do it). This year I am cold in the tropics. But I know that is weather and not climate and await the warm English winter. Oh dear – just seen the forecast.

One would expect warming to be more benficial (and thus less dangerous) in colder climes like England/Wales vs tropical or equatorial desert climes.

I would expect the global result to be a net positive as well, but until it’s analyzed I don’t think one cam say this study proves anything about global effects.

I completely agree–a few years back I was down in Death Valley and we stopped at the Ubehebe Crater–an excellent meteorite impact feature, and the temperature on one side was about 112 in the shade! But on the other side where the trail goes, the temperature was 114 degrees (since it was more exposed to the sun), and there were dead people EVERYWHERE! I figure that additional 2 degrees is wot done it!

From the study:Mortality was lowest at 14.3-17.3°C in north Finland but at 22.7-25.7°C in Athens. Overall the 3°C minimum mortality temperature bands were significantly higher in regions with higher than lower mean summer temperatures

The main finding was that cold related extra mortality was a tenfold of the heat related mortality outside the optimum band.
No direct explanation of the southward increase in optimal temperature band was given, maybe a question of adaptation of people in general to different temperature regimes, or genetical adaptation over several generations…

A very superficial look at both indicates that presuming winter temperatures go up along with summer temps, the net result will be neutral or positive. I haven’t parsed things exactly, but it appears that if you the more days you raise ABOVE O C, the more days you get NO cold deaths.

Heat deaths become much more related to education, knowledge, etc. The so called “heat wave” of 2003 in Europe was primarily LAUGHABLE to my friends and relatives in PHX. If we take PHX numbers of 40 deaths per year, and a 4 million population, for the 400,000,000 of Europe we’d expect 4,000 deaths (extra) from a prolonged, PHX style “temperature increase”, not 30,000…making us highly suspicious of certain “technological and educational” disadvantages. Along with acculturation and accommodation problems. (I was in London in the summer of 1989, and the dock workers on the Thames were complaining terribly of the problem of working in 84 F “heat”. Which in my area would be considered a MODERATE summer day!)

Let me see,
“the IPCC AR4 states with very high confidence that climate change contributes to the global burden of disease and to increased mortality,”

The review on this website of the UK paper takes the results of the analysis, which was based on the assessment of temperature effects alone, on 1% the world’s human population, living in a concentrated cluster on less than 1% of the global landmass,

and makes the gargantuan, logic-defying leap to the conclusion:

“Clearly, the IPCC’s “very-high-confidence” conclusion is woefully wrong. Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.”

Climate change impacts, as per Tim W’s blog, are about so much more than than just temperature, and that is why I find the comparison to be such a stretch of the imagination….

If you read the article (Tim Williams posted the link above) you will find statements such as:

“it would be easy to compare the recent decrease in cold-related mortality with the increase in temperature and make the seemingly logical assumption that fewer people have died because of milder winters. Our work, however, shows that this is not the case. We find that adaptation of the population to colder temperatures can explain much of the observed change.”

They do acknowledge that had adaptation to cold weather “remained unchanged, then the anthropogenic warming would have produced a detectable decrease in winter mortality.” However, the same ‘detectable’ conclusion with regards to a mortality increase due to warming is also made.

In the end, Anthony, your assertion that this article proves that “warmer weather saves lives,” although technically correct, is only a half-truth and is a manipulation of the article’s intended conclusion. On the other hand, CO2 Sciences’ ‘What it Means’ section is an incorrect exaggeration, as according to the article, “in the real world the effect of adaptation appears to be more important than the impact of the anthropogenic warming.”

Now I’m not trying to tell you that your assertions regarding the overall topic are wrong, merely that this article should not be used to support them.

CUT THEIR FUNDING PRONTO! If this gets out, why people will start flying to places like Hawaii,Greece, Italy, Spain, the Caribbean, maybe even the beaches at Cancun! We can’t have that! Think of the children, and drowning polar bears.

solarbud says:
November 23, 2010 at 3:00 pm
This study looked only at the UK. The IPCC looks at the whole world. You people obviously don’t care about the folk who died in the Russian heatwave
====================================================
google “Russian drought” “Russian famine”
and get back to us……………………
Then explain why droughts, famines, and heatwaves are considered common in
Russia, and why it has happened so many times, a lot worse, in the past.

Interesting bit of doublethink. You’ll accept that the temperature is increasing if it means that the IPCC was wrong about something. Which means the temperature isn’t increasing because the IPCC is wrong. Please don’t think too hard about this because time will then start going backwards.

Well, this should be very bad news for the AGW skeptics as they are forecasting a rapid decent into the next glacial period.

As it is, this study is nonsense and has no relationship to the global impacts of warming. If AGW only affected the British Isles and was limited to a narrow timeframe, this study might have a tiny bit of merit, but the extrapolation to global effects of warming over a century or more is impossible, and thus this “study” is one more piece for the garbage can of skeptical prattle.

solarbud says:
November 23, 2010 at 3:00 pmYou people obviously don’t care about the folk who died in the Russian heatwave or the Pakistani floods this year, or the crop failures in both those countries and Africa and a host of other places.
You do know the difference between weather and climate, right? Those type of weather events have always occurred. Historically, mankind has always fared far better during periods of warmer climate than colder ones. In fact, it’s just plain ordinary common sense we’d do better, but I guess that is a quality sadly lacking in Warmistas.

I eagerly await the dead toll body count from the winter of 2011 in the northern hemisphere. I believe the 2010 body count of death by freezing in the southern hemisphere was in the hundreds or perhaps into the thousands.

You know this coming winter will be bad now that we are into the third year of the severe solar minimum.

That is certainly an excellent study, comparing mortality in the warm part of the year with mortality in the cool part. This simulates the effect of global warming but does not relate well to actual global temperature change. That is because the surface air temperature data in the period 1976 to 2005 which according to them was 0.47°C per decade during that three-decade period simply wasn’t. That means 1.4 degrees Celsius in three decades, more than the entire century.They are the victims of temperature fraud perpetrated on the public by pumping up that “late twentieth century warming” that simply does not exist. If you take the global temperature curve put out by NOAA you will notice that there was no warming at all in the seventies and the eighties. While NOAA has greatly distorted the eighties and nineties I believe their data for the seventies and eighties are correct because they had no particular reason to change it then. That means half of the time they think there was a warming there was none. That was a time when some people actually worried about a coming ice age and The New York Times as well as Time Magazine and Newsweek spoke of it. From satellite records you can further deduce that in the eighties and the nineties that followed, up to the super El Nino of 1998, there was likewise no warming. The only actual warming during the last thirty years that satellites have been watching it started with the super El Nino of 1998, raised global temperature by a third of a degree in four years, and then stopped. There hasn’t been any since and there was none before. The tail end of their time period just gets in on that last warming spurt. Hence, their conclusions about the effect of seasonal warming on death rates stand but nothing can be said about the effect of global warming on death rates. That is because their global temperatures were way off and they observed only a short spurt of warming mixed in with mostly stable temperatures which makes it impossible to calculate resulting environmental effects.

Tim Williams points out that the beneficial effects reported here should be balanced with the harmful effects caused by floods, droughts, hurricanes, etc. However, according to Pielke Jr. the case for increased hurricanes due to warming is non-existent. I do not know about the dreaded events, but excuse me if I am skeptical and would like to see actual evidence that something more than noise around baseline is actually occurring. I think Anthony and others have gone through that thought process before concluding that this paper suggests overall benefits. What is absurd is that climate scientists continue to list a litany of catastrophy such as increased hurricanes, when the evidence is at best inconclusive.

Global warming doesn’t kill us so that is a positive forcing. It means the warmer it gets the more of us there will be to create global warming. My gawd, Jones was right! The obvious government response should be to withhold Medicare coverage to keep the numbers in check.

BTW, I discovered a new tripping point today out in my snow covered driveway. We don’t normally get snow so soon in Seattle and some summer activity articles are now buried.

The review on this website of the UK paper takes the results of the analysis, which was based on the assessment of temperature effects alone, on 1% the world’s human population, living in a concentrated cluster on less than 1% of the global landmass

Yeah, less than 1% of the world’s human population… how man MILLION is that? Compare that to, what, 14 proxies that apparently determine the temperature of the entire planet? Snark aside, again, I ask you to consider, a) most of the world’s population lives in the NH, b) most of the land mass is there, too, not surprisingly, c) and most of the effect of global warming is there, too, finally d) it doesn’t make sense to consider places that aren’t warming when looking at the drop in death rate due to… warming. That last one alone would take some severe ignorance to gloss over.

“Clearly, the IPCC’s “very-high-confidence” conclusion is woefully wrong. Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.”

It is not logic-defying nor gargantuan. The IPCC did not consider this positive effect of global warming (this is one of many that are easy to uncover simply through the use of common sense.) Quite simply, cold-related deaths drop dramatically when the planet warms. “High confidence” would imply they considered all effects, not just those that support their opinion.

I am curious to see how they ruled out possible third variables that could have interfered with this research study. There is a positive correlation between temperature and the death rate, yes, but how do they know for sure that it is the weather improving human health and not some other factor?

This whole warm = bad, cold = good is rather unproductive and simply a political diversion. I still say if you live in Canada warm = good and cold = normal. I would also suggest that if people have not and do not adapted to either situation; something humanity has been doing for thousands of years, perishing because of it, please do so before you have a chance to procreate and in the summer when the ground is not frozen.

Think of it this way: if we have AGW, it means we will have more intense sunlight to power our solar panels to run our air conditioners.

And yet . . .

I had an interesting experience this summer: the temperature in Temecula, CA got up to 111 degrees one day. Hottest day I’ve ever seen around here. I went inside an air-conditioned building for a doctor’s appointment around 2 pm. An hour later, I came out and the temperature had dropped 16 degrees. We had had a very rare summer thunderstorm that had cooled things off. I’m guessing there is a connection there.

It’s a shame that scientists are just now getting around to ‘proving’ that warmer weather is better for people than colder weather because it very much looks like we’re going into the cooling phase of the cycle. Brrr.

That means it’s 25% very bad news for you, right?☺
______
Now you got it Smokey, that would be IF this “study” had more than 0% validity, maybe…but since it has exactly 0% validity, then it actually represents 0% bad news (and 0% good news). Yet, even though I am only a 25% skeptic, I am not convinced that the next true glacial period is anywhere close by, (probably 20,000-30,000 years by Milankovitch cycles at the earliest).

1) The media will downplay expectations, and diplomats and environmentalists will bemoan how far behind the process is in producing an agreement.

2) There will be a week in which we’re told that diplomatic delegations are working “feverishly” on an agreement, but that the evil and greedy developed countries are still holding out on the massive wealth transfers that have always been the real goal of the process.

3) China and India will proclaim that the process is somehow intended to stifle their development, which they will not allow. (That’s partly true, the Kyoto agenda really is a de-development/anti-development agenda.)

4) Late in the process, it will be announced that negotiations are at a standstill and that the process may fail, dooming the Earth to a flaming death in a matter of decades.

5) At the last minute, the Charismatic Megafauna of the Show will swoop in and dramatically call everyone into a conference room for a marathon, no-breaks, closed-door negotiating session to resolve things. Usually, this is an American president or vice president.

6) At the last moment of the last day, at 4:00 a.m., the bleary-eyed participants will announce that they have reached a agreement on a broad range of goals (mostly aspirational), and that they have agreed to resolve outstanding issues at additional conferences to be held at top-notch resorts in exotic locales, so they can continue the endless rounds of globetrotting and fine dining at taxpayers’ expense (which most of them aspire to).

7) With little pomp and fanfare, they will all retreat to their luxurious fleet of GHG-belching private jets and exit, stage left.

This study looked only at the UK. The IPCC looks at the whole world. You people obviously don’t care about the folk who died in the Russian heatwave or the Pakistani floods this year, or the crop failures in both those countries and Africa and a host of other places.

Because the fact that it’s warmer in January in England is the only thing which matters in your little minds. We are OK, stuff the rest of the world, eh. Makes me proud to be British it does.

Makes me sad that you’re British, it does. Most of the other Brits (sorry, hope that’s not offensive) here have more thoughtful and intelligent comments.

Althiough it is great to see another nail in the alarmist coffin …. it kind of makes me mad. Why is it that something which is SO BLOODY OBVIOUS to the ‘man in the street’, indeed to anyone who just applied a tiny portion of common sense, took so long to be formally recognised by the scientific establishment. This whole sorry episode has done so muich damage to science in general and it will take a generation to repair. It is a tragedy. I am sure there are plenty of scientists out there that also have common sense and can think normally …. why have so many of them not spoken up? Tragedy.

Crop productivity is projected to increase slightly at mid- to high latitudes for local mean temperature increases of up to 1-3°C depending on the crop, and then decrease beyond that in some regions. * D [5.4]

No, you just don’t understand. Temperature isn’t increasing because the IPCC is wrong. Of course they’re wrong, but that’s beside the point. Temperature is increasing because of U.S. postage.”

At the risk of a triple (it’s getting late here), this has very significant ramifications for the mitigation of global warming. U.S. postage is going up because fewer people are sending posts through standard mail. Increased Government subsidies of postal rates would drive the cost of mail down, thus reducing global warming and would be a lot cheaper than all of the schemes already in the works.

manicbeancounter says: “Last winter was the coldest in the UK for 30 years. In 1981 I remember statistics coming out about the weekly death rates. Last year nothing. There were statistics about accidents through slipping on the ice. Maybe it is another area where the government has stopped caring, along with the increase in fuel poverty as a result of paying for green energy.”

When a government is ashamed that its policies are resulting in deaths of citizens, they arrange for the relevant statistics to go down the memory hole. The People’s Republic of East Germany stopped reporting suicide statistics in their “Workers’ Paradise.”

I am now throwing wood into fire like a fireman on a wood burning locomotive.
we in NE Oregon are expecting -10f and lower tonight, faucets running, gas heater isn’t keeping up hence the wood, local records in the Colmbia basin fell or were tied. I
notice a lot of these were set in the last cold PDO period. hmm.
I await Pamela Gray’s report from Wallowa, county,as they are higher and colder…

Yes, 3.5 degrees warmer by 2100 means the British won’t have to go to Spain for their holidays any more, and the Americans won’t need to go to Mexico. Wonderful! If this is what it takes to bring the skeptics around to the IPCC temperature prediction, fine by me. Let’s all support the IPCC science, even if it is just AGW, not the CAGW part, or is it too good to be true?

“A well studied example is the 2003 European heatwave which cost
the lives of more than 30,000 people””

30,000 people dying from temperatures from temperatures that in most places were barely over 100F, in what is theoretically the developed part of the planet, is an indication of something much more ominous than changing climate. It indicates that living in a socialist nanny state, of the exact type suggested as a solution to the looming “climate catastrophe”, can result in a population that is so enfeebled that it is completely incapable of taking even the most basic steps to ensure its own survival.
I’ve never been to Europe, but around here the local Walmart has had window air conditioners on sale every summer for well less than $100 since before that european heatwave. More than half the summers of my over six decades of life have had spells of weather that meet or exceed that heatwave and around here high heat is usually accompanied by maximum humidity. During a personal rough patch I worked in a manufacturing plant here, that produced molded FRP parts. The extruders and presses threw off enough heat to make the temp in the building 25-30 degrees higher than the ambient. The work was quite strenuous, involving moving 15-20 pound parts several times a minute. Nobody died.

But apparently the IPCC made some wrong deductions from its citation of a 2007 UK study by the same authors, which errors they are now in effect protesting. That’s all they’re claiming (regardless of what posters here are saying).

Background
The authors write that “the IPCC AR4 states with very high confidence that climate change contributes to the global burden of disease and to increased mortality,” citing the contribution of Confalonieri et al. (2007) to that document.
…………………..
What it means
Clearly, the IPCC’s “very-high-confidence” conclusion is woefully wrong. Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.

Don’t forget agricultural loss. Tonight we will be at minus 15. That kind of temperature is brutal to fall calving operations. And we have a few in Wallowa County, though most have stuck to spring calving. Fall calving allows for a bigger heifer during market season. However, these fall calves are not old enough to withstand these kinds of temperatures for long. On the other hand, with any luck, we will see some wolf pups dying as well.

Winter wheat (the premier wheat used for the best flour) may also be harmed by these temperatures. Winter wheat is intended to be planted during the warm season and then over-winter. The cold spell is necessary to produce a high-quality product. However, if the ground freezes solid at too low temperatures, winter wheat will not rebound in the spring. Grape vines are another agricultural product that does not withstand ground temperatures that are too cold. If the roots are too shallow, they will not make it.

Direct human death is of course an important statistic and rather easily figured, but there is a lag involved regarding food production that can have negative impacts for months (years?) afterwords, though the temperatures may rebound. This statistic is much harder to figure but certainly affects 3rd world countries.

Well now at least we know where not to look for the truth. Its certainly not in statistical data that totally discounts the rest of the population like this has.
More of the lies, damn lies and statistics. Oh and you can almost say anything you like using statistics. Reality is the truth and there is damn little on this site.

All I can say is that in the last 30 years, climate refugees have turned this once sleepy corner of the world into a rat race. They sure aren’t moving here for the culture. Every time I get a friend visiting from a cold city, it’s always ‘oh, we should move as well, such a better quality of life’.

Humans prefer warmer temperatures. Most people look forward to summer. No science needed.

About all the storms and hurricanes:
Cooling preferentially chills the poles, while the tropics remain almost constant. Thus the contrast is heightened, which boosts the strength and violence of the migrations of heat to the poles.

The LIA, e.g., was notorious for huge killer storms. When the ice caps melt, we can expect nice, placid weather everywhere.

Background
The authors write that “the IPCC AR4 states with very high confidence that climate change contributes to the global burden of disease and to increased mortality,” citing the contribution of Confalonieri et al. (2007) to that document.

And they write that, while their methods are more precise, this was likely to be conservative:

“The results were reported relative to the baseline period of 1961–1990. It should be noted that human activity had already had an impact on the climate during this period.”

Which is par for the course with the IPCC. They are generally very conservative, because of the political review, where politicians from fossil fuel producing and consuming nations try to ensure the profitability of those sectors, and the expense of lives in Africa and Asia, and other lives 50 years hence.

Wombat, usually your nonsense is just scroll-by stuff. But — in warming eras the poles warm most. In cooling eras they cool most. The tropics are very stable. Nothing whatsoever to do with any of the factors you mentioned.

“There is ample evidence that the Earth’s temperature as measured at the equator has remained within +/- 1°C for more than the past billion years. Those temperatures have not changed over the past century.”

Thank you Pamela Gray for a Real World scenario- been there done that,myself
raised on a Cattle and Wheat operation, been around it some peripherally
since-helping friends and family with harvest and roundup over the years. Keep warm, Pamela, snowing now in La Grande. I have seen my Cowboy/Indian (he was 1/2 Cherokee) Pop cry over a dead newborn Calf in a cold spring snow.
Those who have never done what she is talking about will never understand…
I seriously doubt if Al Gore ever farmed with Mules….
My Pop and my Wife’s Pop did…
I have fed Cattle on a Bobsled behind Pop’s Percherons….
Warm is Good,Cold is Bad.

James Sexton says:
November 23, 2010 at 12:28 pmHAHAHAHAHA, is it ok if we gloat for a minute and say “Told ya so!”? I know it isn’t very sporting to say “Told ya so!”, but maybe we can make an exception this once and say “Told ya so!” to all of the warmistas that thought we’d all die a painful death due to milder winters. OTOH, maybe we should be more gracious than to say “Told ya so!”. But, I think there may be some sorted satisfaction that comes with saying “Told ya so!” I just can’t make up my mind as to whether we should say “Told ya so!” or perhaps we shouldn’t say “Told ya so!” and just soak it in for a moment.
Now THAT is funny!!!

And I agree!

Guess what? Last year at this time, here in the north-central Puget Sound, the temp was above freezing (32ºF).

I didn’t have to run my pellet stove because the daytime temps (sunlight through the south-facing windows) heated the house to about 70º in the daytime such that evening temps didn’t get worrisome (anything below 50ºF).

When the cold spell did set in, it was –as usual– in mid December.

About every fourth year here, in this region, the temps get down in the low teens for about a week in December. That also coincides with major snowfall which happened last year.

Well, guess what? Here it is on the eve of Tuesday, 23 November, 2010, 2200 Hours PST, and the temperature is at +12.4ºF (-10.8ºC). The day isn’t over, and I expect that it will get colder yet before daybreak on the morrow.

We’re a bit more than a week early for the lows.

And that’s lower than last year’s low which happened on Dec. 08: 14.0ºF. I can’t recall that happening here before (this soon), and I’ve lived in the region since 1980.

Dave Wendt says:
November 23, 2010 at 6:24 pm
“30,000 people dying from temperatures from temperatures that in most places were barely over 100F, in what is theoretically the developed part of the planet, is an indication of something much more ominous than changing climate. It indicates that living in a socialist nanny state, of the exact type suggested as a solution to the looming “climate catastrophe”, can result in a population that is so enfeebled that it is completely incapable of taking even the most basic steps to ensure its own survival.”

WOW! Is that the same French nanny state that boasted the best health care in the world as of 2000?
Your post is one of the most troubling I’ve read on here. (That’ s no mean feat).

After almost a decade in the UK, living in Berkshire near London first then moving to suburban London, we have found the public buildings in the UK are kept at too high a temperature in winter; the heat that blasts out of open department store doorways is enough to make one begin to peel layers of clothing off. Schools are also very well heated, but school uniforms here tend to be inadequate for both very warm and very cool temperatures – children as young as four begin wearing school unifor, typically long trousers and white business shirt with monogrammed sweat or pullover , tie and blazer, socks and sturdy black shoes are the norm for boys for the entire school year. A thin topcoat, minimally waterproof, can be worn outdoors in any season.
The uniform for girls, usually a skirt, white business shirt with tie plus monogrammed sweat or pullover and a monogrammed blazer, stockings or tights with thin shoes, doesn’t vary significantly either and is equally inadequate as the watchword is ‘uniform’. Kids here are usually stuck with uniforms until they are in their very late teens; it’s not unusual to see young men with mustaches and occasionally, full beards, in school uniform! The big supermarket chains all sell ultra-cheap school uniforms, some of very dubious quality. The idea of unisex uniforms, common in NZ for around 20 years, is only beginning to appear in some Primary schools here.
Most English people I have met seem to believe that the weather here in the South-East of the country is ‘awful’, when in fact it is quite mild and gentle, if a little colder in winter, but very similar to the climate in the lower North Island of New Zealand, where domestic central heating is very unusual but the locals compensate by wearing more appropriate clothes for a given temperature range.
The aged here who live alone or with an aged partner tend to become vulnerable to temperature extremes as their mobility decreases and their sensitivity to temperature change also diminishes. The English do not have positive attitudes to fitness, as evidenced by my GP, who is faintly and permanently surprised that, now I have reached my ‘threescore and ten’, continue to work out with weights every day and do other regular exercise, while I see it as quite normal for everyone, regardless of age; Teachers in Primary schools in NZ regard daily fitness routines as part of the curriculum but there is no time to fit daily fitness routines of any worth into every school day, so fitness never becomes a habit for the majority. The attitude to women’s sport here is generally quite negative and most English men seem to prefer that their womenfolk to be spectators at sport or to exercise in the kitchen! The UK has a large range of financial benefits available to the aged, but many of the needy aged are not aware of these and so suffer needlessly.

This has been painfully obvious for years. In a SINGLE exceptionally hot year it was claimed there were 2300 extra deaths. Age concern said that EACH AND EVERY YEAR there are 23000 deaths due to cold. Last year figures of 40,000 or so were being quoted.

Living in Scotland I doubt even a handful of people died due to the “heat”, whereas there will be many many more in proportion who die from cold.

OK, if warming happened, then I wouldn’t doubt there might be problems in warmer areas of the world, but the point at which warming is worse than cooling would be a long way south of the UK – if any such place existed!

This completely misses changes in temperture/precipitation patterns that affect agriculture and fresh water supply (which affects the amount of the population that starves or is impacted by inadequate water), misses human disease vectors, agricultural disease/pest vectors (can you say “wheat rust”?), for starters.

Hence, this seems to be a ploy of looking through a straw only at the data one wants to build perceptions on, instead of looking at the big picture. Not surprising coming from “C02 Science”…

OT I know, but some posters such as Solarbud make me laugh. Who will probably get cross with me for being heartless, or flippant. Or both. But this study was about the UK – get over it!
Some years ago I taught in a Roman Catholic Co-ed High School. I was chatting to one of the religius teachers out in the grounds and a senior female student, noted for being gorgeous but somewhat airheaded, bustled up to my colleauge
“Brother, Brother! I have just heard that the death statistics have gone up!”
The unflappable Brother smiled at her;
“Don’t worry, child. The statistics are the same as they they always were; one death per person!”

If we’re adapted for any climate, it is the climate of a tropical jungle, or possibly a tropical savannah. It is only in the very recent past that we have attempted to colonise more hostile environments, such as the polar regions – otherwise we would have fur, or other natural insulation, just as everything else which lives in such environments has.

You might think, from your own experience, that you cant stand it when it gets too hot, but you are wrong – you have never really given the heat a chance. I’ve lived on the edge of the tropics, in Brisbane, Queensland, and subjectively, it takes about 3 – 4 months for a body adapted to cold weather to accept the heat. Since this is about the length of a temperate Summer, most people North of say Florida or Italy never discover just how much they could come to like the heat – by the time their bodies are on the verge of adapting, the weather is turning cold, and the adaption frantically goes into reverse, to cope with the winter temperatures.

The adaption from hot to cold seems a lot quicker than the adaption from cold to hot, but maybe thats just me.

There is something wonderful about always being warm enough – quite appart from the bright sunshine and beautiful weather, being so warm all the time that you never need protection from the cold is a liberating experience. I cannot imagine retiring to a cold part of the world.

….“However, even if climate change significantly
decreases cold-related mortality, this benefit should be considered alongside the
other, predominantly detrimental, health impacts discussed in Section 1″

Namely:
…Increased likelyhood of variability of food crop yields as a precursor to the detrimental health impact of malnutrition and hunger….
_________________________________________________________________
Where the heck did you ever get the idea that warmer is bad for food production???? Try telling THAT to a Mongolian Herder. After this last winter you would think that piece of propaganda would have died.

1. Warmer weather means MORE evaporation which means MORE rain. MORE CO2 means plants need LESS water (the stomata do not have to be as open and the do not lose as much moisture trying to get the CO2 they need)
2. Plants LOVE CO2 and it increase growth and production.
3. Increase in warmth has increase the area where grain crops can now grow. That is Canada and Russia.

“The Mongolian winter catastrophe is like a slow strangulation… The early-born baby animals succumb first… then the smaller animal species like the cashmere goats …then the big ones… At this point several million animals—the livelihood for Mongolia’s nomadic herders—have perished, and the winter is beginning to take the lives of people…”

Let me see,
“the IPCC AR4 states with very high confidence that climate change contributes to the global burden of disease and to increased mortality,”…
___________________________________________-
And IPCC takes their information from the “Unbiased” reports of Greenpeace and World Wild Life Federation (Own and run by the rich)

Anyone who has never grown a carrot, please, stop talking about how a warming world would lead to crop failures. Cold not only freezes, it produces drought (read up on the dust bowl era). And just try, I dare you, to milk a cow in minus temperatures. Warm your hands first, if you can. When I was a little girl, my job was to milk the cows before they got hooked up, to get a pan of milk for the cats. I think it was just to keep me busy, mouth shut, and out of the way. In the warmer seasons, I liked my job. But I sure didn’t like it in the winter.

Here’s another helping of reality, back before we had electricity out to the barn and water tank, we had to carry hot water out to the tanks, one bucket at a time, more than once a day. A week of bitter cold freezing night and day time temps will leave your animals searching for water. Yes, they eat snow, but it stresses them out. If electricity prices rise beyond the ability of ranchers to make a profit, we will be back to carrying hot water to our animals again because we will have to shut off the electricity to our outbuildings and water tank heaters. And don’t tell us to sell out to big ranchers. Besides, if you are a true greenie, you don’t want to eat animals raised under feedlot conditions.

Interesting bit of doublethink. You’ll accept that the temperature is increasing if it means that the IPCC was wrong about something. Which means the temperature isn’t increasing because the IPCC is wrong. Please don’t think too hard about this because time will then start going backwards.
________________________________________________________-
SIGHhhhh
Climate runs in cycles. There are lots of cycles like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) that just turned cool, the Suess, de Vries, Gleissberg cycle and the Milankovitch cycle (Glaciation – the sum of all of the factors affecting insolation including Eccentricity, Precession and Obliquity)

As Far as the Milankovitch cycle goes (the one that is the most scary)
Joe Romm over at Climate Progress states:“Absent human emissions, we’d probably be in a slow long-term cooling trend due primarily by changes in the Earth’s orbit — see Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds…”

This paper also agrees that we are at the point in the earth’s Milankovitch cycle that ushers in an ice age. The biggest question of course is why we are not covered in ice yet.

“Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….”

The actual data shows the earth is gradually headed downhill towards another glaciation, the only question is when and how. A quiet sun, cool ocean phases and a major volcanic eruption would be my guess as the trigger point. CO2 warming can not counteract the combined effects of the other big three. As the oceans cool the CO2 levels will increasingly drop.

“Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global temperatures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.

Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earthvs climate can shift gears within a decade….

But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur…“

As far as I am concerned the neglect in looking at a change towards a COOLING world is down right criminal negligence – my biggest gripe with CAGW.

Also if the earth’s climate was so all fired sensitive to CO2, not H2O, then the earth would have fried millenium ago during the Paleozoic Era when the CO2 levels were between near 7000 ppm.

This obviously calls for a scientific study to see if there is a causal relationship between #2 and #1.

I just hope it doesn’t mean that it causes more old people to wear bikinis. :-)
_________________________________________________________________
No it just means you will see more old folks in flowered shirts and baggy shorts using binoculars to study (oogle) the young folks.

“A well studied example is the 2003 European heatwave which cost
the lives of more than 30,000 people””

Dave Wendt says:
November 23, 2010 at 6:24 pm
…. It indicates that living in a socialist nanny state, of the exact type suggested as a solution to the looming “climate catastrophe”, can result in a population that is so enfeebled that it is completely incapable of taking even the most basic steps to ensure its own survival….
___________________________________________________________
I will agree with that. My hubby is 67 and I am 60. We lift 50 to over 100lbs for over eight hours in temperatures over 100F on the SE coast of the USA (High humidity) Biggest factor DRINK LOTS OF WATER. Dehydration is a big killer.

Controlling the worst of the next ice age may boil down to keeping large dams from forming in major water ways. It’s been done on a smaller scale already. Iced up rivers have been blown apart for decades.

“Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.”

Romans built around a natural hot spring in Bath centuries before science was a method. No sugar Sherlock! This paper is mischievous in the extreme and would not need to have been written had science not been so perverted by the warmists.

Pamela-back in the cold 60’s they did exactly that-blowing up ice Dams on the
Grande Ronde near La Grande , Or. on I-84 about where the old Mill Dam was. -20 wasn’t uncommon through the 70’s . Of course I think we are headed there again. Oh another thing that I remember is being slappped by a Urine Soaked Cow’s Tail at -10F. Or getting stepped on by said cow as you set the machine on a cold, chapped udder. I verify every thing you say…Nothing like Grass fed beef, took my wife by surprise when she had her first Grass Fed T-bone, she was raised in the Midwest and used to feedlot beef.
As an aside, before the start of the Warm period n the Western US the Early 1980’s were still suffering from the Ice Age Hysteria. (Not sure its so Hysterical now) but,
there was talk of glaciation resuming in the Steens and Strawberry Mtns. Malhur
lake and Harney lake-home to a huge wildlife refuge grew to a point of joinng
together, and there was worry about ranches flooding and the city of Burns, Or.
itself. Then it turned warm, and I was privy to a “Global Warming Briefing ” by
a USFS Drone, at an Airtanker base meeting in Silver City NM. (’89)She even quoted
Hansen’s Congressional Testimony in ’88! of course this was the year after Yellowstone and the FUBAR that was. Even as a budding Tanker pilot, It was clear
that there were some in the government that wanted a “let burn’ policy in dry
years. and the mood was-” it isn’t ever going to rain/snow again, so live with it.”
Well things have we seem to have switched back to cold, and no, I am not looking
forward to that..

Thousands of pensioners died from cold-related illnesses last winter as heating bills soared and temperatures plummeted, official figures reveal. The number of deaths linked to the cold between December and March reached 25,400 in England and Wales, with another 2,760 in Scotland.

The figures are equivalent to nine deaths every hour. The total gave Britain the highest winter death rate in northern Europe, worse than much colder countries such as Finland and Sweden.

There are fears the death toll could increase this year following energy price rises which may frighten elderly people into not turning on their heating.

Michelle Mitchell, of Age UK, said: “It’s unacceptable that tens of thousands more older people die in this country every winter from the effects of the cold weather. The fact that the UK has one of the highest winter mortality rates in Europe makes it clear this is very much a home-grown problem. Behind these statistics lie deep-seated social issues, such as one in three over-60s living in houses which fail the ‘decent home’ standard.”

However, the UK death rate total fell by around 30% compared with 2008-9 because there were fewer flu outbreaks, according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS). ONS researcher Vanessa Fearn said: “Although the winter of 2009-10 was the coldest since 1995-96, excess winter mortality fell by almost a third.This may be because levels of influenza were low.”

Dot Gibson, general secretary of the National Pensioners Convention, called for more government help for the elderly. “No other section of our society is so vulnerable and treated so badly. Pensioners need more money in the form of the winter fuel allowance so that they can avoid having to decide whether to heat or eat.”

Simon Bottery, of the charity Independent Age, said 25,000 deaths was still too high. “The cost of fuel can be a real strain, and leads some older people to cut back on other basics or risk the cold,” he said.

As has been documented here, and many other places, and also in their own hand via the climategate emails, there has been little to no science involved in anything the IPCC has done. It has all been a public relations exercise.

Interesting that in 2001 IPCC wrote the following in the health & mortality chapter:

Guest et al. (1999) compared heat-related deaths in the five major Australian cities in the period 1977-1990 with those expected under different climate change scenarios (CSIRO, 1996a) for the year 2030. They estimate that greenhouse-induced climate change would increase climate-related deaths in the summer by a small amount, but this would be more than balanced by a reduction in climate-related deaths in the winter. Overall, this resulted in a decrease of 8-12% in climate-attributable mortality under the CSIRO “high” scenario compared to a scenario with no climate changes (but expected population changes).

Stephen Pruett says: November 23, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Tim Williams points out that the beneficial effects reported here should be balanced with the harmful effects caused by floods, droughts, hurricanes, etc. However, according to Pielke Jr. the case for increased hurricanes due to warming is non-existent.

Hi Stephen. Increased air temperature results in a much greater carrying capacity for H2O. So while the frequency question is open, the potential for major storms in a warmer world (say +3C) to cause excessive flooding is considerable. Given that engineering around the first world typically caters for 1 in (x)100 year events based on statistics from the last century it means damage to crops, infrastructure and lives as well as expensive redesigns of existing flood mitigation systems. The UK will hardly be immune in this case and the third world, as always, will suffer disproportionately.